Tag: nash equilibrium


Baby Poker: The Smallest Interesting Bluffing Game

Posted in Mathematics

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Baby Poker is a two-player dice game that fits on a napkin and still manages to be a real bluffing game. Each player rolls a single die concealed in a cup. There is one round of betting. That is it. And yet the optimal strategy involves mixed frequencies, a value range, a bluffing range, and a call/fold cutoff. It is the smallest game I know of that has all the moving parts of full poker.

Our working notes: Baby Poker.

The Problem

This one comes from the FiveThirtyEight Riddler column (now defunct, but happily still on the Wayback Machine …



Tags:    game theory    probability    poker    nash equilibrium    riddler   


Ken Binmore's Game Theory and Nash Equilibrium in Shadowrun

Posted in Reading

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We spent part of May 2025 reading Ken Binmore's Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007). It is a 176-page book that has no business covering as much ground as it does. It is also the book that gave us the excuse to work out a Nash equilibrium calculation for a Shadowrun run, which we have been wanting to do for a while.

Full notes on the wiki: Game Theory - A Very Short Introduction.

Why This Book

Game theory has a reputation for being either trivial (rock-paper- scissors and Prisoner's Dilemma) or impenetrable (Von Neumann's Theory of Games and …



Tags:    reading    game theory    binmore    nash equilibrium    shadowrun    ttrpg    mathematics